Outrage grows against organization’s sex instruction in schools.
by JO GARCIA-COBB
Growing involvement in public schools on the part of Planned Parenthood has led to mounting grassroots opposition against the organization’s comprehensive sex education targeting K-12 students in public schools.
“We’re seeing more and more concerned citizens going to their school boards and elected officials demanding that Planned Parenthood-type curriculum be dumped,” said Rita Diller, national director of American Life League’s Stop Planned Parenthood Project (STOPP). Diller monitors grassroots efforts for the pro-life organization.
Parents in Onalaska, Wash., for instance, expressed outrage June 12 during a Fox News broadcast. They said their children were quiet, withdrawn and embarrassed to talk about what had happened in school the day before. When Curtis and Jean Pannkuk began questioning their 11-year-old daughter, they discovered that the principal had given the fifth-graders instruction on oral and anal sex.
“Our daughter didn’t want to go back to school. She cried all the way to school today,” said Curtis Pannkuk.
James Gilliland was enraged that his daughter’s innocence was stripped from her. His wife, Kadra, said, “I was shocked because I trusted my little country school. I trusted my school — that’s the bottom line, and they crossed the line.”
“It’s just the same as raping somebody, but you’re raping their innocence, instead of their physical being,” said Gilliland. “This curriculum has to go.”
The instruction was part of state-approved comprehensive sex education developed and pushed by Planned Parenthood, NARAL, Pro-Choice Washington, the Sexuality Education and Information Council of the United States (SIECUS), and a host of other organizations.
The graphic sex-ed incident at Onalaska is neither isolated nor new. Planned Parenthood and cohorts have been giving comprehensive sex-education instruction in the public schools since the 1970s.
John Pisciotta, a parent from Waco, Texas, who combats Planned Parenthood’s public-school agenda via his website ProLifeWaco.com, noted: “The label that PP gives to its ‘just do it’ approach to teen and pre-teen sex is ‘comprehensive sex education.’”
Besides various Planned Parenthood programs now being taught in thousands of U.S. schools, Planned Parenthood’s contraceptive-based sex-ed program has been adopted by the National Assembly of School-Based Health Care. The assembly has a membership of 2,000 school-based health centers, initially called “school-based clinics,” nationwide.
“We’re seeing a shift in public awareness and action. There’s increased outrage and a sense of urgency,” said Jim Sedlak, vice president of American Life League and author of Parent Power, a book about how to get Planned Parenthood out of the schools.
The shift has in part been fueled by the American Life League-produced Hooking Kids on Sex video report, which contains graphic footage of Planned Parenthood-style instruction in the schools.
Since its release in January, the report has had 700,000-plus viewings on multiple websites, including YouTube. Sedlak said that the overwhelming response to the exposé has been that of “outrage.”
“Now, a significant number of people are finally paying attention. It’s always like pulling teeth to get parents to look at something extremely offensive, yet this is what their children see in schools,” Sedlak said.
The sense of urgency comes from the fact that the Obama administration’s federal budget initially zeroed out all funding for abstinence-based programs and allocated more than $200 million of taxpayer money to implement K-12 comprehensive sex ed across the nation. Congress then voted to allocate a tiny fraction of the budget to abstinence programs.
“The ratio is 16-1 between CSE (comprehensive sex ed) and abstinence. The Obama administration has been pushing for comprehensive sex education with great tenacity,” said Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association. (The association has just released a groundbreaking report, “Sexual Risk Avoidance Education: Considerations for Protecting Teen Health,” which challenges the content, research and funding of CSE’s risk-reduction approach.)
Obamacare and Sex Ed
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a former division of Planned Parenthood, the Affordable Care Act includes “many billions of dollars in new funding for community health centers, which provide family-planning services and other basic reproductive health care to their clients, and establishes a dedicated $50-million yearly funding stream for school-based health centers, many of which provide contraceptive care to students in need.”
Recently, an article about parent Douglas Muravez of Salem, Ore., being in the thick of the battle against Planned Parenthood instruction at his child’s school was published in the Salem Statesman Journal. After learning that Planned Parenthood had signed a contract with North Salem High School and was already teaching its program at the school, Muravez sent several letters to the school board expressing his concern about hiring the nation’s largest abortion provider to teach the class. Read more.